The Lunch-Box Chronicles: Notes from the Parenting Underground

Child Magazine Best Book of the Year
For me, parenting is like dieting. Every day, I wake up filled with resolve and good intentions, perfection in view, and every day I somehow stray from the path. The difference is with dieting, I usually make it to lunch… .
With the candor and often hilarious outlook that have made her a beloved commentator on NPR, Marion Winik takes the reader on an unforgettable journey through modern parenthood, with all of its attendant anxieties and joys.
A single mother with two small boys, Winik knows exactly what she’s talking about, from battles over breakfast and bedtime to the virtues of pre-packaged food and weightier issues like sex education and sibling rivalry. Part memoir and part survival guide, The Lunch-Box Chronicles is an engaging philosophy of parenting from a staunch realist, who knows that kids and their parents both will inevitably fall far short of perfection, and that a good enough mom really is, in fact, good enough.

Marion Winik proves as able a bard for her generation as Erma Bombeck was for hers… . Funny, warmhearted, and chock-full of moments of instant recognition. – Newsday
[H]ilarious and wrenching, it’s about being a parent, but it’s also about so much more: love, survival, transcendence–and macaroni and cheese. –Anne Lamott, author of Operating Instructions
Take Erma Bombeck, add the obsessions of a single mother with two boys … and you have Marion Winik, as companionable a writer as a crazed parent ever found. – The New York Times Book Review